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Joy Redstone: Listen to cries for help

By Joy Redstone

Posted:
08/11/2015 07:16:25 PM MDT

Updated:
08/11/2015 10:13:08 PM MDT

Joy Redstone

Not long ago, a very short article in the Daily Camera reported that the Boulder County Coroner's Office had declared Lara Diesh's death a suicide. Lara, a New Vista High School student, was by all accounts a smart, talented, beautiful young woman. You don't have to have a very vivid imagination to imagine the sadness and loss that her family is experiencing.

The heartbreak of a young person's death is deepened and intensified by our sense of foreshortening. If only, if only, we think, if only they had afforded themselves a chance to let those feelings of despair pass, to let themselves see the sun rise just one more time, to feel that inevitable uplift of the spirit. There is wisdom in the old adage, "Things look different in the morning." The passage of time, we know in our hard-won, heartbroken wisdom, changes all feelings, even those that we think of as too much, too hard, unbearable.

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Any death, but suicide especially, makes us feel helpless. In a culture that is riddled with the illusion of control, the inescapable finality of death is a confrontation with powerlessness that, until experienced, is almost unfathomable. When someone you love takes his/her life, the inevitable consequence for those that loved that person is guilt and self-blame. Our human relationships are littered with conflict, regrets, omissions and mistakes. Our minds seize on these moments, creating inferences of causality, as we reel with accepting the unacceptable. Yet many trauma therapists will tell you that this self-blame is yet another way for our minds to make the unpredictable predictable, because if we can make it our fault, it is somehow possibly avertable.

But this part of our minds that wants to make meaning, well, it's not all bad, at least when it is not creating excruciating guilt for those that survive suicide. There's part of us that gets galvanized by losses like this, a part that says, if I must accept the unacceptable, well, at least I will find a way to make meaning of this.

How can we make meaning of Lara's death?

We can choose to listen differently to each other. Suicide research is unambiguous on certain things. One crystal-clear certainty is that everyone who speaks of suicide is still ambivalent. Ambivalent is a fancy word for "still haven't made up their mind yet." And when a person is in that vortex of hope and desperation, yet finds the courage to form these words that are still so shameful and stigmatized in our society, then we must simply listen. That very act, speaking the doubt about death, is the spark of life still flickering in that person. The act of listening is a gentle breath that blows away the darkness.

There are those that will never speak their secret intention, and those that find a way to disguise their demise. But so often, people let us know that they are struggling and, in fear, we choose not to listen. Fear and our magical thinking tells us falsely that if we acknowledge the pain, we might somehow imply approval or permission. We worry that if we don't protest the decision that we will somehow not communicate our caring, while the opposite is true. Until we stand in that space of acknowledgment, bearing witness to the purely difficult moments of our humanness, we will be leaving the person alone at the moment when they most long not to be alone.

There are many ways that we are already standing together in this way. It's the best thing about people, the way we surround each other with love at the worst times, at the times that are so dark that you just know you couldn't do it without the arms of other people around you. Every small gesture we allow ourselves to make toward the grieving resonates that small kindness to a lifeline back to the world of before.

So, what can we do to honor Lara's death and to support her family? That is the question, and the answer is simple. We can talk directly about this most feared topic. Grieving people will tell you that one of the most painful things they experience is the pervasive avoidance of others. So, look your loved one in the eyes, take a deep breath and say the words your heart wants you to say. Your words will be imperfect, but your heart's love is always perfect and always eloquent.

Joy Redstone is director of the counseling center at Naropa University in Boulder. Email: jredstone@naropa.edu

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